This month Roger Federer won his 1,000th singles tennis match, joining only Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl to become the third male player to have done so since the beginning of the open era in 1968. This achievement cements his standing as one of the sport’s all-time greats, but how does he compare to current and past superstars when you slice the data in different ways?
Staying with endurance, none of today’s top players are likely to match Federer’s record. Of all players ever to appear in the top 10 of the world rankings, the closest to the 1,000 mark is his rival Rafael Nadal, who lies 300 matches behind.
If talent and power were the only factors, this surely would have been the tennis era of the Big Five, not the Big Four.
Juan Martín del Potro had the weapons and the drive to knock down the clubhouse door and demand his place at the elegantly set table with Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray.
But for now, at age 26, DelPo, as tennis fans like to call him, remains a wonder with just one Slam: secured in style way back at the 2009 United States Open, when he came back on Roger Federer in a match that looked like a new paradigm but has turned out to be only a tease.
A number of high school coaches have quickly moved up the college coaching ranks, especially from Texas, and Chad Morris says the reason is simple. … “That’s simple,” Morris said. “Here it is: Because, as a high school coach, you get it. Several things I always had to do as a high school coach. No. 1, I always had to recruit. I had to recruit kids from going straight basketball. I had to recruit kids from going straight baseball, or getting into AAU. I’m constantly trying to recruit kids to my program.
If Sir Dave Brailsford had a coat of arms it would feature a magpie, a sponge and a Great White Shark.
A magpie to represent his talent for spotting shiny bits of knowledge, a sponge for his ability to retain it, and the world’s most fearsome predator because of his appetite for more of it.
It would also be the best coat of arms in the world.
In an until-recently classified report funded by the UK’s Ministry of Defence, researchers revealed something remarkable: you can reap enormous performance gains by altering your perception of effort—and anyone can do it.
Historically, scientists and athletes have thought of the stress that leads to fitness gains as being physical—training longer, running faster, or jumping higher. In recent years, researchers have begun to explore the mental component of training—how visualization can improve performance. But until now, few researchers have examined how mental stress can lead to training adaptations similar to physical stress.
Humans are inherently bad at predicting the future. It’s a defect all too apparent in the corporate world, and in the business of managing complex geopolitics.
But some people have better track records than others, and the ways in which they think about questions and arrive at their projections offer clues as to how the rest of us might become more successful forecasters.
A group of researchers isolated these traits in a study tied to a geopolitical forecasting tournament arranged by an R&D group run by the US director of national intelligence.
Paul Breitner, famous for scoring in two World Cup finals, including in West Germany’s 2-1 victory over the Netherlands in 1974, is at the NSCAA Convention in Philadelphia as brand ambassador for Bayern Munich, the club with which he won five Bundesliga titles and a European Cup. Last year, Bayern Munich opened a New York office and launched a partnership with Global Premier Soccer (GPS).
SOCCER AMERICA: You have been at an NSCAA Convention before, in Washington, D.C., 1989 …
PAUL BREITNER: I remember. In fact I recently found the notes to my presentation. It was already a big event back then, with 3,000 or 4,000. But my first taste of American soccer came in 1971, when I visited my in-laws in Atlanta and saw that children were playing the USA.
… SW: We do have some American players finding a home in the Bundesliga. Do you think that would help improve the U.S. national team, if more went abroad, to Germany or elsewhere?
PB: To have some players in the Bundesliga, in Spain or in another country, always can help you improve because they learn, they feel, they see new ideas. It may be a new development, what happens in the next four years on the pitch, they can bring all these ideas back into the U.S. [Men’s] National Team, back into U.S. soccer.
But, more important, is that soccer in the U.S. must open the doors not only for foreign players, more for foreign coaches.
Implantable bioelectronic sensors allow real-time monitoring of substance concentrations in vivo. However, developing sufficiently miniaturized sensors with the required accuracy of measurement and biocompatibility is a considerable challenge.
Frank N. Crespilho, University of São Paulo, Maria C. Almeida, Universidade Federal do ABC, Santo André, both Brazil, and colleagues have developed and tested an implantable glucose sensor based on flexible carbon fiber electrodes (FCFs). These fibers have promising characteristics for use in microelectrodes, namely their flexibility, conductivity, and the ability to immobilize a large quantity of enzymes used for measurement on the porous electrode surface.
… Pro sports are about to get disrupted by just this kind of throw-everything-against-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks thinking. If you look in the right places, they already are.
A couple of days ago, Cameron, a PyImageSearch reader emailed in and asked about methods to find the distance from a camera to an object/marker in an image. He had spent some time researching, but hadn’t found an implementation.
I knew exactly how Cameron felt. Years ago I was working on a small project to analyze the movement of a baseball as it left the pitcher’s hand and headed for home plate.
Using motion analysis and trajectory-based tracking I was able to find/estimate the ball location in the frame of the video. And since a baseball has a known size, I was also able to estimate the distance to home plate.
The 14-time Grand Slam winner, Rafael Nadal’s recent struggles to participate at the highest level due to ongoing low back pain (LBP) once again brings the issue of novel therapies offering tantalizing cures to the fore; he is undergoing stem cell therapy (SCT). So it is timely to explore: i) what this therapy potentially offers, ii) the quality of the supporting evidence, iii) its comparison to other needle-based therapies, and iv) what the use of several novel needle-based therapies in the last decade (e.g. stem cell therapy, platelet-rich plasma, dry needling) reveal about attitudes to management of pain in sporting populations.
David Arseneault Jr. thought nothing of the email when it first appeared in his inbox.
The message from Dean Oliver, the Sacramento Kings’ director of player personnel and analytics, just seemed like another inquiry about the quirky system his father ran at tiny Grinnell College. Little did Arseneault know that the Kings had been targeting him as a candidate to coach their NBA Development League affiliate, the Reno Bighorns, for a unique basketball experiment.
“I called him, and he asked if I had interest in the job. I said, ‘The head coaching job?'” Arseneault said, recalling the story during the D-League Showcase that concludes Monday night in Santa Cruz. “He said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Of course I have interest.’ I was shocked. I was a 28-year-old, part-time assistant coach at a Division III school in the middle of Iowa.”
The recent edition of IJPAS contained the following paper ‘The wider context of performance analysis and its application in the football coaching process’ (Wright, Carling & Collins). This paper explores the evolution of Performance Analysis (PA) from both an academic and practitioner perspective. The paper is a sort of state of the nation about Performance Analysis, where it has come from and some key questions about the future of this sports science discipline.